The result of this, besides the 10k tools regularly being flooded with poll posts, is the correlation between a post's vote count and its actual quality is gone. This excellent page-long answer by Eric Lippert got buried beneath 4 poll answers, the most verbose of which was 14 words long (the others managed to beat him out with 13, 9, and 7 -- an impressive 8 votes/word). Who knows what other awesome answers today were flooded off the list completely

I'd like to browse through the top-voted questions in my favorite tags to see what interesting issues people have come across, but I can't, because the top voted questions in all of them are polls about the best language feature, or the best IDEs for that language. "Hidden features of [tagname]" is on the first page of every one -- Java even managed two, "Hidden features of Java" and "Hidden features of Eclipse".

If we're going to allow poll questions on SO (and it seems people are unable to help themselves, so it looks like we are), we need some way of filtering out or weighting the votes on them so they don't drown out the rest of the posts that have a normal amount of votes. This is the part where I would propose a magic solution, but I don't have one, so this is a [discussion] instead of a [feature-request]. Are there any simple ways to fix the disparity between votes on normal questions and votes on polls?

Another point of interest is that the questions not dealing with "biggest fear" tend to be elementary, particularly if I'm remembering the "C optimization question" correctly.
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David ThornleyJul 28 '10 at 14:19

4

By mercilessly killing those threads, of course.
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dmckeeJul 28 '10 at 14:50

3 Answers
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There's been a change of mood in acceptable questions now. “biggest fear as a programmer” would now get migrated to Programmers in 5 minutes and closed there in 10 (or 10 seconds if M.T. is the mod on duty).

“i++ and ++i” is one of these easy questions where everyone knows the answer. It should be closed as a duplicate with extreme prejudice, if not closed as general reference if that gets introduced on SO. The same goes for for(;;;) vs while(true).

@Michael Mrozek: That only helps for getting rid of not programming related questions at SO, but not for all the polling questions at other sites, like "what's your favourite game" at gaming.SE. Unfortunately Jeff probably didn't check back for that note...
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Tobias KienzlerJul 29 '10 at 14:41